Coalition Amicus Brief Urges New York Court of Appeals to Reject “All-Content” Search Warrant

On Friday, June 26, EPIC filed an amicus brief alongside civil liberties and criminal defense organizations in New York v. Morris, an important case about cell phone privacy rights during criminal investigations. The brief was filed with the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It urges New York’s Court of Appeals—the state’s highest court—to recognize that the Fourth Amendment does not permit “all-content” search warrants.

All-content search warrants allow law enforcement to rummage through the everything on a person’s digital device (such as their cell phone) to search for evidence of a crime. Because digital devices contain a nearly complete record of many people’s lives, such warrants expose enormous amounts of private, sensitive information unlikely to be connected to any crime to law enforcement.

The brief argues that all-content warrants represent “general warrants” that the Fourth Amendment prohibits. The constitution’s framers included particularity and probable cause requirements for search warrants specifically to prevent warrants from authorizing wide-ranging fishing expeditions. Instead, all-content warrants enable just that. Moreover, all-content warrants are unnecessary for law enforcement purposes given that modern forensic tools allow investigating officers to categorize and filter data.

Many state and federal courts have already ruled all-content warrants to be unconstitutional. Hopefully, New York’s courts will become the next jurisdiction to do so.

EPIC regularly files amicus briefs in cases involving the Fourth Amendment and digital devices.